From the Geil Archives (21)—The Tenacious Wall and the Colossal Soul

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A year ago on Round and Square (5 October 2012)—The Philosophy of History of Philosophy (A History)

Two years ago on Round and Square (5 October 2011)—Seinfeld Ethnography: Newman's Broccoli

[a] Great Wall RF

Click here for other posts written by Guest Contributor Lily Philpott:

1-About Me          2-The Tenacious Wall

Today’s guest contributor on Round & Square is Lily Philpott. She hails from Weston, Connecticut and recently graduated from Beloit College with a B.A. in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. She joins Rachel, Julia, Amara, and Sarah in the Geil archive in Doylestown, Pennsylvania to help digitize the collection and enjoy the stories she discovers there.

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Please note that all items marked "DHS" are property of the Doylestown Historical Society, and used with DHS permission. If you wish to use an image, you need permission of the Society. Please contact Robert LaFleur (lafleur@beloit.edu), and he will put you in contact with the appropriate people. 

When I plucked a couple of sheets of typed notes out of the Geil archive and determined that I was going to write my blog post on them, I had no idea what I was getting into. It seems fitting that I ended up reading an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, because today’s blog-writing process has been positively labyrinthine.
 
It has also been a demonstration of my favorite part of academia – the part that lets you act on a childhood spent reading detective stories (Sherlock Holmes and the Hardy Boys, in my case) and follow various threads of research as if they were clues, before arriving at a more complete picture of what it is that you’re studying.

[b] Glimpse RF

              
I began with pages from a folder in the Geil archive titled “Notes on Chin," read a brief history of the First Emperor of China, Qinshi Huangdi (my Chinese history is rustier than I’d like), and finished with an essay by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, titled “La Muralla y los Libros," or “The Wall and the Books."

Earlier in the week, I noticed the notes that Geil had taken on the First Emperor of China, a leader he calls "Chin."* I made a note to return to them because I liked the glimpse they gave us of Geil’s personality. Due to where they notes are located in the archive, I am almost positive that Geil wrote these while in China, and possibly while on the Great Wall—one of The First Emperor's greatest projects. 
*Geil makes a Romanization error here; it should be "Ch'in" for the system he is using. He also refers to "Chin" the way that we now more commonly write "First Emperor." Finally, the current Romanizaiton is "Qin," and that is what I will use here unless I am quoting directly from Geil or Borges.

Despite the fact that Geil typed out these notes, a certain sense of excitement bleeds through the clumsy spelling and fragile paper. They say, for instance: 

          CHIN is despised by the Chinese. He is considered a HUMAN WEED. But 
          what is a weed? ‘A plant who’S virtues have not yet been discovered’ 
          Emerson” [sic].

[c] Chin DHS

My cursory research on the First Emperor showed that he is depicted throughout history as a tyrant: in the name of ensuring stability to his reign, he was said to have burned books and buried close to 500 scholars alive, but Geil seems to have a grudging, and slightly confused admiration of him. (This, as I’ll explain later, is what drew me to Borges’ essay. Somewhat miraculously, he and Geil are of a similar mind.) Writing about a Qin military victory, Geil types:

          Greece at THERMOPYLAE held Asia at bay!
          But what Asia?
          Thermopylae was aPASS, a narrow difficult rock-
          ribbed pass!!! CHIN DEFENDED A VAST PLAIN!!!!!
          The very mts fought with GREECE:, but plains
          never fight, they are alike inhospitable to frienf or foe.
          Plains do not resist, horizontal landscapes take no sides
          they have no sides [sic]

[d] Books DHS

On the page I found in the archive, Geil drew brackets around this section and went back in to underline the point he made on the nature of plains. I like this document because I can sense the excitement that Geil felt while learning about this ancient Chinese emperor (his dates are 259 BCE to 210 BCE), as well as his struggle with admiring a historical figure who was also capable of brutality. He begins the page of notes by quoting Edgar Allen Poe’s obituary, and invoking the “ancient fable of two antagonistic spirits imprisoned in one body, equally powerful and having the complete mastery by turns."

[e] Wall RF

The First Emperor is the man who left the world with a terracotta army. He foiled an assassination plot by striking his would-be-assassin with “one stroke of his sharp sabre." In Geil’s words he perpetrated a “HOLOCAUST OF BOOKWORMS AND BOOKS” when he burned texts to end the Hundred Schools of Thought.
 
I was drawn to Jorge Luis Borges because of an essay he wrote titled “La Muralla y los Libros” or “The Wall and the Books," where he, like Geil, wrestled with the First Emperor's history. Borges writes:
               
           I read, in past days, that the man who ordered the construction of the 
          nearly infinite Wall of China was that First Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who 
          likewise ordered the burning of all the books before him. That the two 
          gigantic operations—the five or six hundred leagues of stone to oppose 
          the barbarians, the rigorous abolition of history, that is of the past—issued 
          from one person and were in a certain sense his attributes, inexplicably 
          satisfied me and, at the same time, disturbed me."[1]

I don’t expect to ever write this again, but Borges and Geil seem to be of the same mind regarding the First Emperor—half awed, and half disturbed. Geil’s typed notes reveal that while he admired Qin’s military prowess, and lauded him as a “colossal soul," he struggled with the knowledge that he had ordered so many books to be burned. Borges, working, as is his wont, with the idea of time and labyrinths, concludes his essay with a musing on the nature of art. He writes: 

          The tenacious wall that in this moment, and in all moments, projects its 
          system of shadows […] is the shadow of a Caesar who ordered that the 
          most reverent of nations burn its past […] Generalizing the earlier matter, 
          we could infer that all practices have their virtue in themselves […] certain 
          twilights and certain places, try to tell us something, or they told us something 
          that we should not have lost […]; this imminence of a revelation, which does 
          not happen, is, perhaps, the esthetic act."[2]
 
Geil lacks the mercurial brilliance of Borges’ mind, but it is fascinating to be able to draw a connection, however brief, between the two men.

[f] Mountains RF

NOTES:
[1] Borges, Jorge Luis. The Wall and the Books (La Muralla y los Libros), trans. Gaither Stewart. http://www.southerncrossreview.org/54/borges-muralla.htm

[2] Borges, Jorge Luis. The Wall and the Books (La Muralla y los Libros), trans. Gaither Stewart. http://www.southerncrossreview.org/54/borges-muralla.htm